A New website needs backlinks to start ranking
It's easy to leave a podcast buzzing about backlinks and then hit a wall trying to work out where they actually come from. At Website Squadron we build SEO into the way we design and optimize small business websites, including the off-page side of things. Earning relevant backlinks are good if you want Google to take your site seriously. We handle the technical legwork, so you can focus on running your business while your online visibility grows.
New websites rarely lose links because of domain age. They lose them because editors and other partners decide in seconds whether the site looks legit, casting judgement. They eyeball to see if your site has AI-sounding copy and templated design before ever reading your pitch. The fix... 10 to 20 relevant referring domains, earned slowly.
According to Edward Sturm, many credible publishers decide whether to link to your website based on the site's legitimacy, rather than investigating other metrics like launch date and DR. A polished, human-sounding presentation prevents link prospects from dismissing your new website as low-value or untrustworthy. Content that carries an obvious AI-generated tone reduces the willingness of journalists and brands to grant editorial links. Templated WordPress designs resembling PBN's rarely earn consideration from brands seeking credible references. Early link-building efforts benefit more from securing 10 to 20 relevant referring domains than from chasing high DR. Link prospects typically form impressions from surface-level quality signals before any technical authority checks occur.
A brand-new roofer site goes live on a Monday. By Friday, the owner has emailed twenty local blogs, the Chamber Of Commerce directory, and a supplier asking for a link. Got 1 reply, a polite no. The problem isn't the pitch. It's that the site that looks like it was built in an afternoon, and the people deciding whether to link to it can tell in about 4 seconds flat. If you are honest with yourself, that is how you judge other websites too.
That four-second judgment is the whole game in the first ninety days. Domain age doesn't kill new sites. Surface credibility does.
Backlinks for a new website, in practical terms, are the first 10 to 20 other domains that are willing to link to your URL on their pages. Not a thousand. Not "high DA." Just real legit sites, like a supplier's dealer locator, a trade association member list, a local newspaper's small-business roundup, a niche blogger's resource page... any website that point at yours and say, in effect, this cite exists and isn't junk.
How to get backlinks for a new website at this stage comes down to three buckets that actually move: legitimate listings you qualify for, editorial mentions you pitch for, and selective partnerships (sponsored placements properly labeled, plus narrow exchanges with relevant sites). Everything else, buying packages on Fiverr, comment spam, expired-domain redirects, mass guest-post networks, either does nothing or... could actively hurt you. The early job is small, focused, and unglamorous.
Most link prospects can't tell a site is new unless you make it obvious. They aren't checking your domain age. They're skimming your homepage, your about page, and the post you're asking them to link to, and deciding in seconds whether you look like a real operation or someone's weekend experiment.
This is the point Edward Sturm hammers in the featured video: "most link prospects cannot tell a site is new unless you make it obvious, and people linking usually do not check authority." The credibility judgment is visual and tonal, not technical.
Two things give a new site away fastest. The first is AI-sounding copy, the smooth, padded, slightly hollow phrasing that signals nobody actually wrote this beep. The second is the templated WordPress look that reads as a PBN: stock hero image, generic services page, three thin blog posts published the same week. Either one tells an editor you aren't worth the link.
Before sending a single outreach email, fix what a stranger sees in the first ten seconds. A real business address and phone, photos that weren't pulled from a stock library, named people on the about page, a few posts that read like a human wrote them with specifics only an insider would know. If you're a roofer, that means actual project photos, the towns you serve, the manufacturers you're certified by. If you're a clinic, the practitioners' names, credentials, and faces.
Edwards Sturm's point about the "made-in-five-minutes look" is the right diagnosis. Brands and journalists won't link to something that reads as templated, because their own credibility rides on what they point at. Strip the generic hero copy. Rewrite anything that sounds like it came out of a chatbot. Publish two or three pieces of content that demonstrate domain knowledge, not 1500-word "ultimate guides". Just specific posts that nobody could have written without working in your field.
This is the unsexy work that decides whether the next section is possible at all.
Forget domain authority in the beginning. The early target, echoed by a Reddit commenter in the featured video, is 10 to 20 relevant referring domains. Relevant meaning: in your industry, in your geography, or in your customer's orbit. A regional roofing supplier's partner page is worth more than fifty unrelated directory links from sites that exist only to sell links.
10 to 20 sounds modest because it is. It's also enough to move a new site out of the "no signals at all" bucket and into "this is a real business Google has heard about from other real businesses." Beyond that range, returns get harder to engineer and easier to fake, which is when new site owners start buying garbage and regretting it.
Treat the number as a ceiling for the first ninety days, not a floor. Twelve good links beat eighty bad ones every time.
The legitimate categories are narrower than the SEO industry pretends. Free backlinks for new sites exist, but "free" and "legit" overlap in a specific way: they're free because the site lists you for a real reason, not because they're farming links.
Industry associations are first. If you're licensed, certified, or a member of a trade body, that body almost certainly has a member directory that links out. Chambers of commerce work the same way for local businesses, paid membership, real directory listing, real link. Supplier and manufacturer locator pages are underused: if you sell, install, or distribute another company's product, ask to be added to their dealer or partner map. Local newspapers and regional business journals often run small-business roundups, new-opening features, and "ones to watch" lists; a short, specific pitch lands more often than people expect.
Beyond those, niche bloggers and resource-page curators in your vertical link out when the linked page genuinely helps their reader. Local sponsorships, a youth sports team, a charity 5K, a school event, produce sponsor-page links that are entirely legitimate because the sponsorship is. Vendor partner pages, certification badges that link back, and supplier case studies round out the list.
What doesn't belong on this list: generic "free directory" submission sites with no editorial standard, comment-section links, forum signature spam, and anything that emails you offering cheap bulk backlink packages. Those are the backlink sources that look free and cost you trust.
Pitching editors as an unknown site is mostly a writing problem. A good pitch is short, names something specific the publication already covered, and offers a concrete angle their reader would actually want, not a press release, not a guest post about "the importance of" anything.
A roofer pitching a local paper after a hailstorm has something useful to say about insurance claim timelines. An accountant pitching a regional business journal in January has something specific about a tax change that affects local LLCs. A SaaS founder pitching a niche industry blog has data from their own customer base nobody else has. The pattern is the same: offer the journalist a story they can use, not a favor they have to do.
Skip the personalized-but-still-templated outreach that every SEO agency runs. Editors recognize it instantly. A three-sentence email from a real person about a real angle beats a long "I loved your recent post about X" pitch every time. Volume isn't the lever here, relevance is. A handful of thoughtful pitches will outperform a flood of templated ones, and won't burn the inbox of every editor in your industry.
Paid placements and link swaps are where new site owners get into trouble fastest, and where they can also pick up legitimate wins if they're careful.
Sponsored links are fine when they're labeled correctly. If you pay for placement, a sponsored post, a directory upgrade, a paid feature on a niche blog, the link should carry rel="sponsored" (or rel="nofollow"). This isn't a loophole closer; it's the rule Google asks for, and following it keeps the link from looking like a paid editorial vote you tried to hide. The honest version of paid placement still drives referral traffic and still puts your brand in front of a relevant audience. The dishonest version, buying do-follow editorial links and pretending they were earned, is the thing that creates a footprint and eventually a penalty.
Link exchanges work in narrow doses. Trading a link with one relevant partner, a supplier, a complementary local business, an industry peer who isn't a competitor, is normal business behavior and has been forever. Joining a thirty-site exchange network where everyone links to everyone is a footprint factory. The test is whether the partnership would exist if Google didn't.
On do-follow versus no-follow: a no-follow or sponsored link from a strong, relevant site is more valuable than a do-follow link from a sketchy one. The obsession with do-follow backlinks for new websites is mostly noise. Mix is what looks natural. A profile that's 100% do-follow editorial links looks engineered, because it is.
The fastest way to build backlinks for a new site isn't volume, it's sequence. Week one is on-site cleanup: kill the AI-sounding copy, add real photos and named people, publish two posts that demonstrate you know the field. No outreach yet. Pitching before this is done is how rejections pile up.
Week two is listings. Submit to the industry association, the chamber, supplier locator pages, certification directories, and any local business registry that actually vets entries. These are slow to approve but they're the foundation. Expect a handful of links to land over the following weeks from this work alone.
Week three is editorial outreach, a small batch of pitches, each one specific to the publication and the angle. Local paper, regional trade journal, two or three niche bloggers, one or two podcast hosts in the vertical. Short emails, real angles, no templates.
Week four is selective partnerships. One or two relevant link exchanges with non-competitor businesses in your orbit. One sponsored placement on a niche site where the audience is genuinely yours, labeled rel="sponsored." A local sponsorship if there's one that fits.
Then repeat the cycle for the next sixty days, swapping in new pitch angles as you publish new content. Ten to twenty referring domains by day ninety is realistic at this pace. Pushing harder produces worse links, not more of them.
Outsourcing makes sense when the bottleneck is time, not strategy. A founder who knows what a good link looks like but can't write a steady stream of pitches each week is a reasonable candidate for help. A founder who doesn't yet know what a good link looks like will get fleeced, because most new site link building services sell volume packages that produce the exact garbage profile the earlier sections warned against.
Vetting is simple in principle. Ask for the last ten links the service actually placed for a client in a comparable industry. Look at the sites. Are they real publications with real readers, or directories you've never heard of with footers full of outbound links? Ask whether they use rel="sponsored" on paid placements; an honest answer is a good sign. Ask what their monthly link target is per client. If the number is well into the double digits for a brand-new site, they're not building, they're spamming.
The services worth paying are usually small, expensive, and slow. They write real pitches, they place links on sites editors actually run, and they'll turn down clients whose sites aren't ready yet. The cheap monthly packages promising large batches of do-follow links are selling the thing that gets new sites in trouble. The fix for a thin link profile is patience and credibility, not a subscription.
Backlinks for a new site are won by looking like a real business first and pitching second. Credibility upgrades, named people, real photos, copy that does not sound generated, decide whether listings, editorial mentions, and selective partnerships will land at all. Ten to twenty relevant referring domains in ninety days, built through industry associations, supplier directories, specific pitches, and properly labeled sponsored placements, beats any volume package. Patience and relevance are the levers, not authority chasing or do-follow obsession.
When we first started out, we listed our website everywhere we could, particularly across social media. Over time, we began offering certain services for free, and in exchange other websites linked back to us on a one-way basis.
An early target is ten to twenty relevant referring domains within the industry, geography, or customer orbit. The benchmark is to reach that range by day ninety, using a steady month-by-month cadence to get there.
Surface credibility is judged quickly based on the homepage, about page, and linked content rather than domain age. Common red flags include AI-sounding copy and a templated WordPress look with a stock hero image, a generic services page, and a few thin blog posts published all at once.
Legitimacy upgrades include a real business address and phone number, actual project photos, named people on the about page, and two or three posts written with specifics only an insider would know. Early cleanup should also remove AI-sounding copy before any outreach begins.
Effective sources include industry association member directories, chambers of commerce, supplier or manufacturer locator pages, local newspaper small-business roundups, niche blogger resource pages, local sponsorships, partner pages, certification badges that link back, and supplier case studies. These can be grouped into legitimate listings to qualify for, editorial mentions to pitch for, and selective partnerships.
A strong editorial pitch is a short email that references something specific the publication already covered and proposes a concrete, reader-useful angle. The angle should be timely and practical, such as an insurance claim timeline after a hailstorm or a tax change affecting local LLCs.
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